The Institute of Denial
October 18, 2020
When you are a Conservative party sorely lacking in factual support for your programs, you launder bad ideas through a far right wing “Institution” or “Center”.
It’s where you get a significant number of anti-science, climate denial, and now, Covid denial memes.
Hoover Institution Fellow David Epstein, at Hoover.org:
Without a doubt, it is a major challenge to accurately model and predict the course of climate change. Climate systems are highly chaotic, which makes it difficult to figure out the effect of any particular natural or human event on future climate changes. We should therefore proceed with caution before making bold claims that the main, or even sole, driver of climate change is the human generated increase in the carbon dioxide level, which now is approaching 415 parts per million.
One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.
The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House in August as a pandemic adviser.
Twitter has removed a tweet from White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Scott Atlas that sought to undermine the importance of face masks because it was in violation of the platform’s Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy, a spokesman for the company confirmed on Sunday.
Atlas wrote in a tweet posted Saturday, “Masks work? NO” followed by a series of misrepresentations about the science behind the effectiveness of masks in combating the pandemic.
UPDATE:
As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response.
Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.
Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
–Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest.
October 18, 2020 at 11:18 pm
Something similar has happened with “alternative medicine” being sneaked into once-legitimate science-based medical organizations (like the Cleveland Clinic), often as a well-funded addition to the program. They give it the newer term “integrative medicine” to shed the bad connotations associated with “alternative medicine”, but from the science-based medicine point of view, it’s just the horrible mainstream acceptance of quackademic medicine.
Anything good about integrative medicine is not unique to IM.
Anything unique about IM is not good.
October 19, 2020 at 9:40 am
Here’s another genius advocating a herd immunity strategy, who listens to conspiracy theories, and won’t take the vaccine:
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-covid-lockdown-great-barrington-declaration-1540200
October 19, 2020 at 10:07 am
A review of the Great Barrington Declaration, which Musk likes:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/21517702/great-barrington-declaration-john-snow-memorandum-explained-herd-immunity
GBD has potential ties to a Libertarian think-tank:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/18/covid-herd-immunity-funding-bad-science-anti-lockdown
October 19, 2020 at 10:39 am
A current review of the White House politics regarding the virus, vaccine, and herd immunity ideas:
Trump’s den of dissent: Inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges
By Yasmeen Abutaleb, Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-den-of-dissent-inside-the-white-house-task-force-as-coronavirus-surges/2020/10/19/7ff8ee6a-0a6e-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html
October 19, 2020 at 11:26 am
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-shifts-away-no-lockdown-strategy-amid-growing-case-numbers-2020-10?utmSource=twitter&utmContent=referral&utmTerm=topbar&referrer=twitter
After opting against lockdown measures throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Sweden is said to be shifting strategies toward the kinds of restrictive measures adopted by most of its neighbors.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, is set to meet with local health officials over the next week to discuss new measures to introduce in response to outbreaks in Stockholm and the nearby city of Uppsala, The Telegraph reported.
October 19, 2020 at 12:39 pm
Tegnell had admitted in June that ‘mistakes were made’ in Sweden’s response:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903717
The death toll was too high. Sweden hasn’t officially admitted they were going for a herd immunity strategy, but it looks like they were, and were surprised to find that herd immunity was a lot harder to achieve than first assumed and that protecting the vulnerable was tougher than expected.
There are a number of reports as well that Covid antibodies only last a few months, and there a handful of cases of people getting infected twice.
A widely accepted and effective vaccine combined with mask use, distancing, limited group sizes, contact tracing, rapid testing, and lockdowns (but only under severe outbreaks) supported by governmental funds where needed seems a better option than a purely theoretical and potentially very dangerous libertarian strategy to me, anyway.